The Man from the Diogenes Club
by Kim Newman
(Monkeybrain Books, $15.95, 389 pages; trade paperback, published
in June 2006.)
 In
Kim Newman's postmodern hands, the Diogenes Club -- introduced in Arthur
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories as a club for anti-social gentlemen
-- has become the front for a secret cabal dedicated to protecting England
from menaces too bizarre for public knowledge.
Richard Jeperson, the titular hero of The Man from the Diogenes
Club, is the organization's top agent during the 1960s and 1970s.
He dresses and behaves like a glam rocker -- much to the distress of
some of the club's more traditional members.
Richard can't remember his early childhood. The origins of his fellow
agent Vanessa are equally mysterious. As a young man, he saved her life
when she was barely a teenager, and she, too, suffers from memory loss.
The ambiguous Jeperson/Vanessa relationship -- which references the
similarly percolating sexuality of Steed's and Emma Peel's interactions
in the classic mod-spy series The Avengers -- fuels the best
of these stories. A few adventures set later in Jeperson's life, in
which Vanessa is less present, lack a certain effervescence.
Heavily laced with references to British pop culture, Newman's Diogenes
stories involve mind-control, supercomputers, reality-warping psychics,
ritual murders, Egyptian curses, megalomaniacs, utopias ... every case
gives a fresh twist to pulp-fiction tropes. The adventures ooze glam
and mod stylishness.
Although Newman is clearly amusing himself and his readers with his
clever literary tricks, he never parodies. Rather, he concocts erudite
pastiches in which the dangers are always immediate, the thrills always
genuine.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 30 September 2006.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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